The Scalia diet of right-wing-only media consumption left me satisfied, but angry.

A strict Scalia diet of ex­clus­ively right-lean­ing me­dia con­sump­tion got off to an aus­pi­cious start. It began en route to the re­li­gious right’s Val­ues Voter Sum­mit by flip­ping on Fox Ra­dio and hear­ing an archived au­dio clip from Gore Vid­al:

You’re born in­to a so­ci­ety and you are shaped by it wheth­er you know it of not, wheth­er you like it or not. Each of us is born in­to a pris­on of re­ceived opin­ion, of su­per­sti­tion, and of pre­ju­dices. Now, one of the func­tions of art is to try and define the pris­on. The artist must know he’s in it, and many of them don’t, and those are the bad artists.

This writes it­self, I thought. And in some ways, time listen­ing to Rush Limbaugh and read­ing Er­ick Er­ick­son on Red­State.com did pre­dict­ably feel like be­ing in­side a high-vaul­ted cell where the echoes of like­minded lifers drown out all oth­er sounds.

“I have been mak­ing the point, try­ing to any­way, that the Re­pub­lic­ans are win­ning,” Rush Limbaugh told his listen­ers on Colum­bus Day. “That at least the Cruz and Lee fac­tion is win­ning.” Agreed, says the Daily Caller in a story head­lined “How Cruz, Lee and Paul shut down Obama’s agenda,” in which au­thor Chris­toph­er Bed­ford says: “One thing is un­deni­able: Their stand has lit a much-needed fire in D.C.”

So yes, there cer­tainly is a strain of be­liev­ing only what you want to be­lieve — known in tech­nic­al terms as “epi­stem­ic clos­ure” — hap­pen­ing in sec­tions of the me­dia. It’s this type of group­think that al­lows Sen. Ted Cruz to head to a lunch with his col­leagues last week to tell them ac­cord­ing to his polls, things are go­ing great.

But many of Cruz’s col­leagues didn’t buy it. And neither does every­one in the con­ser­vat­ive me­dia.

“Look, this isn’t work­ing out that well for Re­pub­lic­ans. I think the facts show that, so it’s not that con­tro­ver­sial to say that,” Me­gyn Kelly said on her Fox News show last week.

Even Ant­on­in Scalia, who re­cently told New York Magazine that he stopped read­ing “lib­er­al” news out­lets like The New York Times be­cause it made him angry in the morn­ing, prob­ably has a sense of how poorly things are play­ing for Re­pub­lic­ans. And yet, the battle rages on.

There’s a vein of un­der­do­gism that runs from Fox News, to the Daily Caller, all the way to Red­State that makes the fisc­al fight un­der­stand­able. Pro­gram­ming is filled with stor­ies about WWII vet­er­ans who gave their “blood, sweat and tears” for this coun­try only to be turned away at their own me­mori­als. And mak­ing things worse, ac­cord­ing to an­chors like Kelly, is that chan­nels “oth­er than FOX” only want to cov­er the rally as a means to point out con­fed­er­ate flag-tot­ing pro­test­ers. “They want you to think it was all about the so-called fringe,” she said.

It’s no dif­fer­ent, really than her seg­ment with O’Re­illy from just days earli­er where they dis­cussed a Wis­con­sin pub­lic school that pro­posed to lim­it the amount of Christ­mas songs sung by their choir. There’s a war out there against the little guys, wheth­er it’s against Christ­mas or vets, and if Fox News won’t stand up for them, no one will.

So sure, the ma­jor­ity of Amer­ic­ans may dis­ap­prove of how Re­pub­lic­ans are hand­ling the shut­down and debt crisis, even they’ll ad­mit that, but this is about stand­ing for what’s right des­pite be­ing in the face of it.

So while ideo­lo­gic­al pur­ists, such as Sens. Lee and Cruz and a chunk of House Re­pub­lic­ans, con­tin­ue to fight on, the in­ev­it­able deal will be viewed by many in con­ser­vat­ive me­dia as a cave by the rest of the GOP. On Tues­day, Limbaugh was already say­ing that the “es­tab­lish­ment Re­pub­lic­ans are not con­ser­vat­ive” and Er­ick­son is call­ing on Re­pub­lic­ans to “keep the fight on the con­tinu­ing res­ol­u­tion about Obama­care.”

Even the es­tab­lish­ment con­ser­vat­ive out­lets, which are ad­mit­ting Re­pub­lic­ans are not faring well in the pub­lic re­la­tions war, are stead­fastly stick­ing to the con­ser­vat­ive policy po­s­i­tion on Obama­care ““ it’s a ter­rible law that de­serves to be re­pealed. Look at Bill O’Re­illy, who for weeks said the de­fund-Obama­care ef­fort was doomed to fail and then last week ar­gued: “If the pres­id­ent is really look­ing out for the folks, he has to know things are not work­ing out well. And the coun­try needs an­oth­er year to bet­ter or­gan­ize the health pro­gram and to see who is go­ing to suf­fer be­cause of it. That’s just fair.”

That Re­pub­lic­ans are los­ing the fight has be­come a tru­ism, even in the con­ser­vat­ive me­dia. But the con­clu­sions that the left and right come to based on those facts couldn’t be farther apart. O’Re­illy isn’t say­ing there nev­er should have been a fight over Obama­care, he’s say­ing the fight should have been about delay, not de­fund. Er­ick­son goes even farther, say­ing the real reas­on that Re­pub­lic­ans are los­ing sup­port is be­cause they are be­ing too wimpy on the mat­ter (a re­cycled ar­gu­ment for why Mitt Rom­ney lost his pres­id­en­tial bid).

“The Red­State con­tact email is now get­ting one anti-GOP email for every one anti-Demo­crat email,” Er­ick­son wrote today. “That has nev­er happened be­fore. All these polls show­ing Amer­ica hates the GOP are ac­cur­ate. Even Re­pub­lic­ans hate the GOP and the GOP might have to learn that the hard way in 2014 primar­ies.”